Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1405101 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-06
• Released on: 2002-09-24
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .56" h x 6.30" w x 8.56" l, .44 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Like Borges, who felt that every story benefited from a good mystery, Mar!as (A Heart So White) packs murder, intrigue, even ghosts into nearly every one of the dozen short narratives in this collection. Mar!as, one of Spain's most prominent contemporary writers, shows his macabre playfulness right from the start. In "The Night Doctor," a dinner party leads to a nighttime walk through Paris, and introduces two similar Italian women with similarly unpleasant husbands, and a mysterious doctor whose evening visits may put a permanent end to their marital problems. In "Broken Binoculars," a seemingly innocuous conversation at the racetrack develops into a frank discussion of assassination. "Flesh Sunday" features a man looking out from the balcony of his honeymoon hotel room. While his wife lies on the bed behind him, he watches a woman who may--or may not--be waiting for him. These tales, like others in the collection, are enigmatic, almost elliptical, and are related by a narrator distinguished by his urbane wit and unflappability. The one long story here, "Blood on a Spear," typifies the author's taste for misdirection. The intriguing opening scene shows the narrator's friend murdered, impaled on his bed with a naked woman by his side. As the unnamed narrator investigates, he learns that little is as it initially seems. In a foreword, Mar!as reveals that nearly all the short fictions were written on commission, and that many came with external requirements (such as a summer setting, or a crime element), which heightened Mar!as's literary gamesmanship. The foreword also discloses, amusingly, that "Broken Binoculars" originally appeared with the first page accidentally discarded, in what Mar!as calls "the worst printer's error ever perpetrated on one of my texts." (Apr.) FYI: Mar!as won the 1997 International IMPAC Literary Award for A Heart So White.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A first English translation of a 1995 collection comprising 12 elliptical, often insidiously compelling stories from the prizewinning Spanish author, whose highly regarded fiction artfully blends Henry James's subtle indirection with flagrantly Gothic and Grand Guignol narrative materials. Two of Maras's novels, in fact, are here compressed and reimagined: the suave Oxford College comedy All Souls in ``No More Love,'' and the harrowing family psychodrama A Heart So White in ``The Honeymoon.'' Most of the pieces are brusque glimpses of lives derailed by quick-strike passions or moral confusionsall recorded by an aloof narrator who seems to stand comfortably outside the orbits of the individual ``worlds'' he observes so dispassionately. This limits the power of several tales to involve usthough there are a few striking exceptions: ``Fewer Scruples,'' told with weary self-mocking wit by a ``financially strapped' woman who auditions for a porno film; the bizarre detective-story thriller ``Blood on a Spear''; and the brilliant title story, a monologue spoken by a ghost who understands the shape of his life only after having departed it, and learned how and why he died. Dependably intriguing (if uneven) work from one of Europe's most interesting contemporary writers. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The [London] Times Literary Supplement
Javier Marias writes with elegance, with wit and with masterful suspense.